A New GNSS-Based Approach for Volcanic Crater Location During Lava Fountains

Abstract

Recent studies have focused on the capability of the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) instruments to detect volcanic plumes by means of either variation in signal-to-noise ratio or products from positioning processing. These new approaches can be extremely useful for volcanoes worldwide, which may not have advanced monitoring systems or during bad weather conditions when other techniques may fail. In this letter, we show how the GNSS stations can provide a new tool to locate the volcanic crater during highly explosive events. The proposed method has been tested on the lava fountains at Mt. Etna (Italy) that has characterized most of the eruptive activity from different craters since 2011. Our results confirm that not only there are evidences of detectable interaction between volcanic plumes and GNSS data but also, for the first time on a large data set, we are able to discriminate the erupting crater with great precision.